The Traveller is the story of the Jewish tradesman Otto Silbermann, who must witness how more and more of his relatives, friends and business partners are arrested or simply disappear in Berlin in 1938. He tries to remain unseen and flees, taking one train after another, travelling across Germany, and straight through the state of emergency. He observes. The indifference of others. At times their empathy. And his own fear.

Boschwitz, born 1915 in Berlin, emigrated to Scandinavia in 1935, where his first novel was published. The Traveller was developed during longer periods in Belgium and Luxemburg, which was then published in 1939 in England and subsequently in the US and France. Despite his Jewish background, he was interned as ‘enemy alien’ shortly before the war, and sent to Australia, where he lived in a camp until 1942. On the return journey his boat was torpedoed by a submarine and sank. Boschwitz died at the age of 27.